Paradox Lost – Part One

Perhaps the best metaphor to describe the contemporary church, with apologies to John Milton, is Paradox Lost. Somewhere along the line many church leaders have forgotten what Randy Alcorn calls the grace and truth paradox.[i] We must be full of grace and truth (John 1:14). When Jesus walked this earth, he gave us an invariable paradigm to follow often expressed by the prepositions in but not of:

I have given them Your Word; and the world has hated them, because they are not of this world, even as I am not of this world. I do not ask you to take them out of this world, but keep them from the evil one. They are not of this world, even as I am not of the world. Sanctify them in the truth; Your word is truth. As you have sent Me into the world I also have sent them into the world. (John 17:14-18).

This paradox of grace and truth, in but not of, is a distinction that is often missing in this present age. In many ways it is an inevitable consequence of the seeker-driven church growth movement, as the pendulum swung away from absolutes and stances for truth to a Cole Porter culture of Anything Goes. Collectively the so-called “emerging church” movement is harder to pin down than Jell-O because it is an amorphous group with an eclectic feel. As such the whole postmodern phenomenon is hard to pigeonhole. Still the overarching idea is to contextualize the culture.

I do not think for a moment that the church should aspire to become irrelevant.

There is always a need for Christians to speak the gospel into their own context.

Rather, my concern is with the ever-present danger of overcontextualizing. Consider what happens to a church that is always trying to appeal to an increasingly post-Christian culture. Almost inevitably, the church itself becomes post-Christian.[ii]

Such a clarion call should be heeded as the note of a clear trumpet to every local church leader. In fact, this treatment is a short prescription to pastors and church leaders for discernment in the age of Oprah. Of course, the true cure will take much more medicine, but all of us can seek counsel from the Great Physician.

Perhaps the element most missing in an era of placebo prescriptions is the need for discernment. The pressing need is not for the church to emerge into something our culture would see as pertinent in a narcissistic society but that we recognize what is real and relevant is the redemption God offers through Jesus Christ. The church can not afford to market tunes on cyberspace ipods playing downloaded ditties for an adoring audience. Instead we need to engage our culture with something more than trivial pursuits. We need the truth. This is one element much of the emerging church wants to airbrush to minimize hurt feelings and assuage egos so that people might find healing (see how therapeutic our language has become).

Out of this all-too human tension and polarity is borne the perennially paradoxical quest for, and escape from, the truth. Truth is a daunting, difficult thing; it is also the greatest thing in the world. Yet we are chronically ambivalent toward it. We seek it . . . and we fear it. Our better side wants to pursue truth wherever it leads; our darker side balks when the truth begins to lead us anywhere we do not want to go. Let the truth be damned if the truth would damn us! We want both to serve the truth and to be served by it. Such is our uneasy lot, east of Eden[iii]

We as leaders have bought into this by the way we judge our own effectiveness. The usual question circulated in church circles is framed in the form of growth and success. The supernatural is reduced to a spreadsheet: budgets and bodies. Nothing is inherently wrong with numbers and spiritual growth, unless we throw out truth to expand our own empire. Many banish any mention of offensive words or topics and pander to the popular rather than the peccadilloes of our own personalities. Inevitably, there is a subtle tendency for the pendulum to swing too far away from truth and lose the paradox between grace and truth, in and not of. Ask Joel Osteen, the seventh flag over Texas, and pastor of the buzz of Houston, Lakewood Church, a megachurch with over 30,000 people attending each week. His appearance on Larry King presented opportunities to document his belief in the exclusivity of Jesus Christ as the only way to God and Joel passed repeatedly. He later apologized on his website:

God has given me a platform to present the Gospel to a very diverse audience. In my desire not to alienate the people that Jesus came to save, I did not clearly communicate the convictions that I hold so precious. I will use this as a learning experience and believe that God will ultimately use it for my good and His glory. I am comforted by the fact that He sees my heart and knows my intentions. I am so thankful that I have friends, like you, who are willing to share their concerns with me.[iv]

We should take that at face value and offer forgiveness. Still, even the posted response reveals a need for discernment in the paradox of grace and truth. The shift is subtle but substantial: the desire not to alienate trumps the truth we need to communicate. Jesus Christ is always a stone of stumbling and a rock of offense to those who do not believe but precious and valuable to those who embrace the indescribable Christ (I Peter 2:7-8).

The second element that leaders need to examine is how this deconstruction of truth leads to a different message in terms of presentation. There is a sense that above all amusement matters in matters that matter. Entertain! Be creative! I am surprised we do not rewrite John 1 to say in the beginning was the image rather than the Word. Gurus from Brian McLaren to Leonard Sweet tell us unless we are image driven we are passé.[v] Attention spans are short and audiences do not know scripture so keep it short and keep it fluffy. The effective church service needs to be the EBay of the spiritual surfer. Such insight offers some probing analysis of where our culture is but offers little solution for transforming individuals into the image of Jesus Christ. There’s nothing wrong with offering different mediums in the Mars Hills of the American arena, but we should notice that the Acts 17 dialogue at the Areopagus in Athens led to sneering and snootiness when Paul mentioned repentance and judgment and a Man raised from the dead! The message conveyed did not amuse or bemuse but scored a direct hit. Damaris and Dionysius left the crowd to follow Jesus Christ.

It is interesting that many in the contemporary church insist that an insatiable appetite for innovation leads down a road that increasingly stiff arms Scripture and embraces experience and image. The seductive power of a media monopoly is indeed as Neal Postman so prophetically predicted amusing us to death.[vi] Reality television has created a world without substance. The corrective for the church is not to indiscriminately embrace image and discard substance. The paradox is we can do both by using Image to point to the inspired, but in the end faith still comes by hearing and hearing by the word of God (Romans 10:17). In essence, the ultimate goal is not amusement or bemusement but clarity that brings transformation by justification and sanctification. In a sense, we are back in the backwoods of biblical illiteracy in our culture and people are destroyed for a lack of knowledge (Hosea 4:6). Rather than botoxing the Bible to make it appear more attractive, our greatest need is the unvarnished veracity of God’s Word. It seems leaders should be given out larger doses of truth rather than pre-packaged bite size bits of the paraphrased pragmatism substituted for Scripture. Personally, this pastor has heard it all as reasons for short sermons to the point of being called Pastor Pharaoh because I will not let my people go. Still, God tells us to preach the word not to condense the truth. Too many tell us to embrace the spirit of the age when we should embrace the age of His Holy Spirit.

Today, challenges to the faith come from a consumerist mentality. It’s ok to be a Christian today – just as long as you treat is as a consumer choice, as one option among many. . . Image is everything. That’s postmodernism in a nutshell.[vii]

Postmoderns need to emerge into a church that God can faithfully use to transform a culture. There is a greater sin than boredom – and that’s discounting the sufficiency of Scripture and a God that is able. The truth is the dying do not need the image of living water they need the substance of the person of Jesus Christ. The cleverness of the age will not satisfy the slake of the soul. Only the unadulterated milk of God’s pure Word can satisfy the craving of a generation without God. We do not need to dumb down the message but to lift up the cross so all might be drawn. God uses the foolishness of preaching to save those who believe. It is not the cleverness of speech, which in fact can void the cross of Christ, but the power of God that saves (see I Cor. 1:18, 21).

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[i] Randy Alcorn, The Grace and Truth Paradox (Sisters, Oregon: Multnomah Publishers, 2003).

[ii] Philip Graham Ryken, City on a Hill (Chicago: Moody Publishers, 2003), 22.

[iii] Douglass Groothus, Truth Decay (Downers Grove, Il.: InterVarsity Press, 2000), 9.

[iv] Joel Osteen, A Posted Letter, www.joelosteen.com/site/LarryKingLetter

[v] Leonard Sweet, Postmodern Pilgrims (Nashville, Tn.: Broadman and Holman Publishers, 2000).

[vi] Neal Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (New York: Penguin Press, 1985), see pp 78-79.

[vii] Charles Colson, Lies that Go Unchallenged in Popular Culture (2005, Wheaton, Ill.: Tyndale Publishers, 2005), 365.